Archive for the ‘Presentations’ Category

Over the last few weeks, Fishing Cactus has received a few visits of the nice people from ProSiebenSat.1 Games. The reason behind all that brouhaha was Creatures 4.

ProSiebenSat.1 happens to be a proper media and entertainment mogul over here in Europe. “ProSiebenSat.1 Games GmbH is the games company of ProSiebenSat.1 Media AG. As a leading publisher, the company focuses on the licensing and distribution of online and mobile games, and acts as a strong digital distribution partner for the gaming products of premium partners all over Europe.” is what the press release lingo precisely says. Not only do they distribute in Europe several hit online games, including the great blockbuster games DC Universe™ Online, PlanetSide® 2, and the sequel of the EverQuest® franchise. They also run successful television stations (their original activity) in Germany and Nordic Countries, and have ties with massive French and Italian channels too (TF1 and RAI).

This is just the ideal partner for us, as small indie developer, and Bigben Interactive, as publisher. By partnering with this ideal fit, our respective companies will be able to each focus on what they do best: us making the game, Bigben Interactive making the toys and physical goodies and handling the logistics, while ProSiebenSat.1 Games makes sure that there are many people playing the game across Europe and that we can scale up the network properly.

Cause it’s now official, the ink on the contract barely dry: we have entered an agreement with ProSiebenSat.1 Games for the distribution, maintenance and marketing of our game on the Old Continent.

There are a few consequences to this.

The first one is merely cosmetic: the official launch title will be changed from the tentative Creatures 4 to the definitive “Creatures Online” in an effort to attract new players who had never heard of the previous episodes some good 15 years ago.

A more important shift is the fact that ProSiebenSat.1 Games is now in charge of deploying the right server network for us, which they have booked already and plan to be ready with around July or so. Once that’s in place, they will be running a first round of beta, which at first will be CLOSED. Access to the beta will be as easy as creating an user account on their network, signing Non-Disclosure Agreements and then stick to confidentiality for realsies

If you live in another area of the World not covered by ProSiebenSat.1 Games, don’t worry about a thing — We have no intention of leaving you standing in the rain alone. We are currently on the look for Northern American and Asian distributors of similar magnitude and we are in talks with several companies for that. Announcements will follow in due course.

Last but not least, a lot of you have asked us to show video footage of the alpha version we’ve recently feature locked. We’d like to do that. But rather than taking a lot of time editing a trailer that doesn’t talk to you, we’d like to combine the depth of our game with the pleasure that was the Q&A session we recently had in the CreaturesCaves chat rooms, a few months back… So! How about a Google+ HangOut event with the team sitting in a sofa in front of the running demo, everybody? Would you attend to that? Say some time this June? Let’ s hook it up!

In Algo-Bot, you’re given control of a little robot dude. You don’t control him directly, you don’t make him jump on mushrooms by pressing a single button either. Instead, you set up a sequence of orders for him: go straight, turn left, go straight again, turn right, etc … . When you’re done creating your little sequence, you pass it onto the robot: it will go around the power plant, following your orders. In a nutshell, the player manipulates sequential commands to order Algo-Bot around in an attempt to reach the given goal of the level.

Of course, your little robot can’t just roam freely, it has a job to perform. It must carry around toxic containers, sort them out and re-arrange them, and call on smaller robots to help him when he has too much. And you have to provide him with orders for every step that he takes.

Imagine the following situation: you have to get your robot around a specific arranged path, and you can see that this path is repeated a few times along a mission. What you have to do thus is to create a separate sequence of orders that you call each time you want the robot to go through that path. Exactly like how functions work in real programming! By solving small problems in the game, you’re learning the logic behind it all. You’ll be able to play with programming concepts such as variables, functions, conditions and groups.

So that’s our Algo-Bot for you. We’re currently in finalization stage with this Serious Game and we hope to deliver it by the end of the month. Be sure to check it out when it comes out! We’ll of course keep you abreast when it does.

Have you ever wanted to learn programming, but were too intimidated to give it a try? Were you turned off by the logic intricacies that programming requires? Well, here at Fishing Cactus, we are currently working on a Serious Game that will help you with that. The game is about Algo-bot, a cool little robot that’s here to teach you the basics of coding. So, grab your cup of coffee, here the story begins.

A few months ago, Technobeltasked us with making a game that would be used at their training center. So we set out to create a game that will help people grasp the essential skills of logic that the programming craft requires. And that’s how our little Algo-bot was born.

The Algo-bot world is one of leaking toxic containers, industrial crates and stubborn little robots. It takes place inside an unspecified power plant, in an unspecified future, with an unspecified number of hazardous things waiting for you. Fortunately, there is one thing that is specified: the gameplay!

We know how hard it can sometimes be to wrap one’s head around some of the concepts of programming (been there, done that, bought the t-shirt), so we made sure that you were appropriately supervised.

There are two characters in Algo-bot that will help you throughout the game: Tina, and the Director. Tina is the mechanical engineer of the power plant. She’s not afraid of getting her hands dirty, works hard, and likes to crack a good joke once in awhile. She’s there to help you learn the basics of the game and give you some tips when you get overwhelmed.

The director, as his name suggests, is the big boss of the power plant. He’s not funny. He’s stubborn and only concerned about one thing: efficiency in programming. He will remind you of that fact whenever an opportunity for optimization presents itself.

Next post, our designer will take you through the gameplay mechanics of Algo-bot right in this column. Come back for more later

It’s kinda strange writing my own presentation and publishing it. It’s like asking yourself the questions and giving the answers at the same time , but… that’s how it is, so I won’t hesitate any longer.

Since a few weeks you have probably noticed (and I definitely hope so, otherwise I’ll need to wake you up a bit more, I guess!) our blog has finally become more active. Yea, well, there’s someone behind it, and that someone is me! Nice to meet you, Fishing Cactus fans, I’m your new PR Manager. Bruno has great plans for me (I hear an evil “MOUHAHAHA” behind me)…

Let’s start with the big bad news of the day. Creatures 4 is delayed until Q2 2012 (no date yet). I know, it sucks, but let me explain the reasons for this fairly huge delay and why it will be a good thing for the game.

As you may all know, video games are an international thing, the world is getting smaller, yes yes yes we know that! Well it seems like our Belgian company is crossing the borders and getting some visibility to the east, as proves this article

Another great review of Shift Extended (available on PSN Mini) has been posted on GamesDailyNews. On top of an extraordinary score (9.5 out of 10) we also got a Gold Award. Nice isn’t it?

“Who knew that black and white could be so much fun? It’s a very mature puzzle platform title that, while almost looking retro, is very modern and extremely interesting to play. I look forward to more like it.”